The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64) - Linda Hogan

A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)

How we have been pulled from the land! And how poetry has worked hard to set us free, uncage us, keep us from split tongues that mimic the voices of our captors. It returns us to our land. Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. It is a lockbox of words to put an ear to as we try to crack the safe of language, listening for the right combination, the treasure inside. It is life resonating. It is sometimes called Prayer, Soothsaying, Complaint, Invocation, Proclamation, Testimony, Witness. Writing is and does all these things. And like that parade, it is illegitimately insistent on going its own way, on being part of the miracle of life, telling the story about what happened when we were cosmic dust, what it means to be stars listening to our human atoms.

For Native peoples, our systems of knowledge are not about beliefs but about ways of knowing and how we know, through experience itself. It is not what is taught in books, not in ordinary classes, but what lies beneath all the new ideas.